by K Dulai

For Benedicto Figueroa

In front of Sweet Priscilla where you make lattes and tend to the lonely,
how is it that on the bench where we sit and don’t kiss, we kiss and call out for what is holy?

Our aching lumbar spines press against that Jersey Avenue storefront window
Our hunched shoulders roll forward to shelter the poems on our chests, we keep our ghazals drunk on poets’ milk, on what is holy.

The Hudson flows yards from us, a wishing well of good poems overshadowed by towers of business suits that disassemble into the river at dawn and make false approximations of what is holy.

But at dusk, I see you on a stage at the Waterbug Hotel or above the Keyhole Bar. I listen for everything, clicking with the elixir you give my pen. I listen for your love, the ghazals that you shelter for what is holy.

You conjure the devotion of your mother’s love, you project struggle and your father’s confrontation of what is holy.

Am I allowed to say it? I see you standing handsome and confident, speaking sometimes of fair skin, of broad noses, and red hair—the historiography of Puerto Rican New Jersey and now you make experience what is holy.

The ink in this pen is drying. I am remembering my scholar uncle Surjit, asking whether I am Kavita or ghazal, and I am answering by listening for you, for what is holy.